I’m not sure if the inmates are running the asylum, but they seem to be running the White House. The president* has been in a week-long funk since he proclaimed victory in the midterms, a lie that not even he believes. He’s been lashing out, picking unnecessary fights, and behaving like a man who should be wearing a straitjacket, not an overlong red tie. Hence the featured image of Houdini in a straitjacket. There’s occasionally method to my madness.
Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has filed a bone-chilling report about West Wing craziness:
As Donald Trump’s West Wing careens through one of the most turbulent weeks of his presidency, White House officials are struggling to understand the source of the fury fueling the president’s eruptions. “This is a level of insanity I’ve never seen before,” one former West Wing staffer told me. Current and former officials are debating different theories for Trump’s outbursts, ranging from his fears over his son Don Jr.’s legal exposure to the prospect that House Democrats will unleash investigations in January. “He’s under a tremendous amount of mental stress,” one prominent Republican close to him told me.
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Trump remained in a dark mood during his weekend trip to France to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. As The Washington Post reported, he got into an argument with British Prime Minister Theresa May during a phone call on the flight across the Atlantic on Friday. On Saturday morning, Trump skipped attending a rain-soaked ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to honor the Battle of Belleau Wood. When his absence became a scandal, the White House said the decision had been made because Marine One reportedly could not fly in the rain, and Secret Service did not want Trump traveling by motorcade. One Republican briefed on the internal discussions said the real reason Trump did not want to go was because there would be no tent to stand under. “He was worried his hair was going to get messed up in the rain,” the source said. “[John] Bolton and everyone was telling him this was a big mistake.” A former administration official said Trump hates being outside in wet conditions. “What I honestly think? He woke up and said, ‘It’s pouring rain. This is a joke and I’m not doing this.’”
So it really was his hair. We’d all been making those jokes but even I didn’t think that was it. I wrote it off to another tantrum when it was a hairy tantrum. The whole incident is the best example yet of his lack of political acuity. The fact that this would become a huge mess was predictable but the president* was shocked. Listening to people can be a good thing. Try it sometime, Donald.
The Insult Comedian’s weirdest public quote of the week was this:
“The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes. When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”
I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this. Of course, I’m relatively sane.
A change of shirt is not enough, I’d add this to make it a better disguise:
Has this bozo ever actually gone to a polling place? We know that he was a sporadic voter before running for president* and it shows. This is what happens when low information voters elect one of their own.
The other White House crazy comes from the East Wing. Melania Trump got John Bolton’s right hand woman, Mira Ricardel, shitcanned. That was weird enough but the crazy was compounded by this:
In a White House where the drama has been constant, but almost always behind the scenes, an email to reporters on Tuesday from Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, was unusually direct: “It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House.”
This led to lazy comparisons to Nancy Reagan’s problems with Ronnie’s second chief of staff, Don Regan. I never thought I’d defend Nancy BUT that dispute was largely kept behind closed doors. Nancy’s spokesperson did not issue a statement. It became a bigger deal upon the publication of Regan’s book about his time in the two-A Reagan administration. Unlike the Trumps, the Reagans were famously close: Nancy probably rolled over in bed and said, “That one-A Regan has gotta go.”
Back to Ricardel’s ouster. Who’s going to wax and oil Bolton’s mustache now? I was working on a Ricky Ricardo pun on her last name but decided to cut her some slack. Why? I’ll never know.
Finally, in the world of crazy there was this story out of Baltimore:
A man shouted a pro-Nazi and pro-Trump salute during a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre on Wednesday night in an outburst that some audience members feared was the beginning of a shooting.
Audience member Rich Scherr said the outburst happened during intermission. The man, who had been seated in the balcony, began shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.” Immediately after that, “People started running,” Scherr said. “I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot. I thought, ‘Here we go.’ ”
The man was escorted out a few minutes later and the show continued. But Scherr, 49, said it was hard to focus on the play after that. “My heart was just racing. I didn’t even really pay attention to the second act.”
Oy, just oy.
I think David Simon nailed it when he RT’d the Sun story:
Circling back to our featured image, this Nazi creep wouldn’t liked Harry Houdini any more than Tevye. Houdini’s father was a Rabbi.
The last word goes to Dave and Phil Alvin:
